The short-list for the
international Booker Prize is comprised of ten writers from nine different
countries. Vladimir Sorokin was chosen to represent Russian Literature. In my
view this is at it should be, as Sorokin is the only one, except perhaps Fazil
Iskander, who deserves not just the Booker Prize, but also the Nobel Prize.

But that’s just what I
think.

Many people don’t like
Sorokin, sometimes they hate him and more often than not they don’t understand
him, mistaking the views of characters for the author’s own. There is so much
blood and pain in his books that they are both hard to read and hard to put
down at the same time.

Like Tarantino, Sorokin has developed a certain language
of violence, which helps him to engage his readership and take hold of their
subconscious.

Related:

“I am always writing
about Russian metaphysics,” Sorokin once acknowledged and of course he was
right.

The science of looking beyond the physical studies the original,
fundamental, unmoving reality – that which is not visible to any eye that has
not experienced
pain. In this dark kingdom of eternal forms, Vladimir Sorokin the veteran
Platonist reveals the national archetype.

He is helped by his temperament,
which constantly puts him at odds with the authorities.

Sorokin plays the same
role in the literary process of our generation as Solzhenitsyn played in the
1960s. But while Solzhenitsyn created and documented the past,
Sorokin concentrates on the future.

The earlier writer sought the roots of
tragedy, while Sorokin predicts them. But ultimately both writers are after one
and the same thing – the truth.

For Solzhenitsyn, ‘not living a lie’ meant
revealing what the authorities hid, whereas Sorokin wants to reveal the truth
that language hides from us.

And here their paths part for good – it is this
distinction that explains why Solzhenitsyn spoke out after time had passed,
whereas Sorokin listens to the times - he concentrates on the present.

Sorokin thinks in
layers and writes in the cycles of opuses. Having touched on a raw nerve, a
sore point of our time, Sorokin won’t leave it alone until it has stopped
aching.

While in his early books (the best of them being “Marina’s Thirtieth
Love” and “The Norm”) he examines the semiotics of totalitarian power and the
linguistic mechanisms of repression, later Sorokin has stepped away from
brilliant conceptual experiments in favor of autocratic utopias.

Having set out
the boundaries in “Day of the Oprichnik,” in rich prose Sorokin elaborates on a
Russian nightmare with a Chinese twist.

Like Swift or Orwell, but
even more like the Strugatsky brothers, Sorokin laughs at the familiar and
invents a fantastical realm. Able to condense five centuries of history,
Sorokin describes reality in the context of the eternal.

Life, confined into
the only form possible for it, is doomed to last indefinitely. At least until
the oil runs out. What happens next is described in his latest book “The
Blizzard.”

Using Leo Tolstoy’s
story “Master and Man” as a starting point, introduces his favorite technique in his writing repertoire – the literalization
of metaphors. So in Sorokin’s work the “malenky chelovek,” the small man of
Russian literature, has become even smaller.

Now he fits on a dish, drinks out
of a thimble, but swears like a trooper.

The main characters in
“The Blizzard” spend day and night fighting their way through a blizzard and
spend their life on a road that is packed full of dangerous escapades,
torturous imaginings, amorous adventures, drug-induced highs and discussions on
the nature of good, evil and the nation.

But the landscape stays the same,
which is why nothing is visible, like on the metro. This is why the destination
becomes increasingly murky, and the only thing that’s important is the journey
itself, the road, which is ever more hard to find.

In Sorokin’s
post-apocalyptic world everyone is going somewhere, but no one is moving. In
his early work this oxymoron was illustrated by a queue, in his more mature
works the metaphor for this is a blizzard. Eternal and indifferent, it seems
like a natural obstacle, but the physical challenge in the book turns out to be
metaphysical.

It makes it hard to find the way, the snow makes it impossible to
reach the intended destination, yet it is impossible to return home.

In this small
masterpiece Sorokin does not defile the great Russian literary tradition, he
just summarizes it. Coachman Verkhushka is not merely a composite image of a
nation capable of bearing great suffering, but a nation that is impotent.

Doctor Garin personifies all the do-gooders in the liberal tradition. True to
his duty as a doctor, he makes a vaccine, which prevents the Colombian Plague,
which turns people into zombies (cocaine?)

On the way Garin goes through
all the challenges typical for a member of the intelligent class. He gives in
to passing desires, becomes good friends with a coachman, punches his face,
seeks redemption and finds it in the throes of hell.

Under the influence of a
psychedelic potion, Garin explores an underworld where reality is exaggerated,
where he, as we were promised several times, is fried in vegetable oil. Neither
public confession, nor impassioned prayer, nor empty threats stand a chance of
saving him from these terrible tortures.

But then, having come to his senses,
Garin again experiences a religious reverence for his return to normal life and
buys two portions of the potion, which is strongly reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s
novels.

And it keeps snowing,
the coachman is freezing, the doctor isn’t going anywhere. The space that has
been made alien by snow remains alien and strange. Like all Sorokin’s latest
opuses, “The Blizzard” finishes with Chinese intruders, when the new master of
life rides into the distance on a three-storey-tall horse.

In order to appreciate
Sorokin’s phantasmagoria, readers need a basic knowledge of the Russian
classics Sorokin stylizes
and interprets. This is why Sorokin’s work is hard to translate, but not
impossible, as proved by the success of his books abroad, especially in
countries with a totalitarian past – in Germany, Austria and Japan.

In the United States
it is harder for people to understand Sorokin, but the recent release of his
books, first and foremost the “Day of the Oprichnik,” in English, has opened up
the sharpest voice in contemporary Russian literature to an American audience.
A Booker prize would not be out of place here.

Alexander Genis is a Russian-American writer, broadcaster and columnist for the Russian newspaper, "Izvestia."

Modern myths and fractured visions

By Nora FitzGerald

If Vladimir
Sorokin spent more time in the United States, the acclaimed author would surely
develop an even larger cult following: His appearance alone confirms the
American idea that Russian writers are rugged and serious non-comformists
emanating noble elegance.

Sorokin’s fiction fulfills a more rigorous role,
however, bearing witness to society’s ills through the creation of violent myth
and grand metaphor. Here is a primer for acolytes following him in English:

“The Ice
Trilogy” (NYRB Classics)—The three-novel opus is a departure from Sorokin’s
earlier works and represents a resurgent realism in Russian literature,
according to critics.

“Sorokin is best
when in the detailed evocation of individual psyches,” according to RBTH
literary critic, Phoebe Taplin. “He seems equally at home mimicking businessmen
or anarchists, web designers, chemistry professors or members of a new age
cult. “

For the uninitiated, Sorokin’s fiction is known as brutally and
repetitively violent. He is deeply controversial in Russia, so much so that his
denouncers once invited people to throw his books into a mock public toilet.

“Day of the
Oprichnik”(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2011)—This high-tech fairy tale has
been compared to a performance art piece; in its form, it echoes Solznitsyn’s
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” But in its content, it is truly
singular.

According to Taplin, “Sorokin uses a spicy mixture of archaic Russian
terms and futuristic slang. His characters drink kvass and eat kasha, while
driving high-end cars (mercedovs) decorated with the traditional oprichink
symbols — a severed dog’s head (to bite the tsar’s enemies) and a broom (to
sweep them away).

“The
Queue”(NYRB Classics)—Released in English in 2008, the novel tells the
archetypal Russian story of the line that winds around the city streets even though no one knows what’s at the end of
it.

Miniature vignettes, snatched
dialogue and small dramas create a Kafkaesque vision of a permanent, static
life in a line—one that never quite explains itself.

Sorokin is not the only
writer to explore this theme: Olga Grushin’s “The Line” offers an historical
version of this lemming-like behavior and the existential attachment to
standing and waiting.